VIRTUAL BENEFITS

Do you ever wish you could run Linux within Linux? Or how about DOS within Linux? QEMU is an open source application that lets you emulate a complete hardware environment within your Linux system.

Linux supports several applications that let you emulate the conditions of a hardware architecture. These applications can create a virtual computer within your Linux machine. You can use this virtual computer to test software or even run another operating system. An application that emulates a hardware environment is known as a system emulator. The most common system emulators for Linux are Bochs [1], a very powerful emulator that is often difficult to configure, and VMware [2], a very good and very fast emulator that, unfortunately, comes with a higher price because it is a commercial product. But another competitor in the field of system emulation is coming on the scene. In this article you’ll learn about the power-ful (and free) QEMU system emulator application. QEMU is extremely easy to use, and it provides simple commands for tasks that may be difficult with other emulators. I’ll show you how to use QEMU in some real situations, but keep in mind that this article only covers a fraction of the features and commands available with QEMU. To see the rest, download QEMU yourself and put it to work.